


Sweetheart Contract

by Nenalata



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Bad Jokes, Buddy Cop Vibe, F/F, Pre-Canon, Spooky Blank-Faced Byleth, and you can't tell me they never worked a job together, blinky squinty winky, god I love shamir so much, mercenary, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:15:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22415326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nenalata/pseuds/Nenalata
Summary: “Maybe try pretending you’re having fun even if you’re not,” Shamir suggested to the kid—Bennett, maybe, some starts-with-a-B name she’d immediately forgotten upon introduction.Bennett—or whatever—didn’t twitch. “I am having fun,” she said. “Are you not?”~*~Four years before Byleth takes up a teaching position at the Officers Academy, Jeralt's mercenary troupe teams up with one Shamir Nevrand. And Shamir Nevrand has never met someone quite like Byleth.
Relationships: Jeralt Reus Eisner & My Unit | Byleth, My Unit | Byleth & Shamir Nevrand, My Unit | Byleth/Shamir Nevrand
Comments: 17
Kudos: 127





	Sweetheart Contract

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MintCHOCHOchip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MintCHOCHOchip/gifts).



> My good pal P got me to write like, a guilty-pleasure fic of low-key flirty Shamir/Byleth mercs working a job together and god, did I pounce. I am such a sucker for this concept and you cannot and will not convince me it is not canon.
> 
> I hope you like it, man. I could write this stuff forever.
> 
> Side note: I know Shamir says she's been at Garreg Mach for 5 years, not 4, but she also says that like, halfway through White Clouds, so whatevs, shamir, enjoy dealing with 16-year-old byleth

Shamir usually liked silence. Preferred it, even.

Silence to muffle footsteps. Death rattles. Clean cuts of steel. Fast kills.

Silence made for bad company when feigning innocuous behavior on the job in a noisy, crowded inn with a frantic, paranoid mark checking the crowd every five seconds. And ‘silence’ defined Shamir’s current conversation partner.

“Maybe try pretending you’re having fun even if you’re not,” Shamir suggested to the kid—Bennett, maybe, some starts-with-a-B name she’d immediately forgotten upon introduction.

Bennett—or whatever—didn’t twitch. “I am having fun,” she said. “Are you not?”

Shamir stared the girl down, but she didn’t appear cowed. Or sarcastic.

She didn’t appear anything at all. Just a muscled, too-young merc with a blank face and notched sword.

With a sigh and signal to the bartender, Shamir cast another glance over the tavern crowd. “Coulda fooled me,” she mumbled. Then, louder: “You want another?” The bartender sloshed some mysterious liquid into her empty flagon.

“No, thanks. I should focus.”

Shamir downed the new flagon almost the second the bartender’s back turned away once more. She didn’t ordinarily drink more than once while on a job, but gods, didn’t this kid—Byleth!—make it tempting.

“There he goes,” Byleth muttered. She nodded at a retreating, cloaked back following other hooded forms through the back door. “Let’s move.”

“Hold on.” Shamir’s gloved hand came down hard on Byleth’s arm. The girl flinched, hand flexing for her sword, and while her features hardly moved, it was the closest to an emotional response she’d shown this entire annoying job.

“What?”

“Let him walk,” Shamir told her. “He’s been antsy for three days. I’m willing to bet he knows he’s being followed. We can’t confirm his suspicions the second he deviates from his routine.”

Byleth gave her such a calculating stare Shamir almost felt the need to glare back. There was something kind of…unearthly familiar about the kid’s eyes. But, “Okay,” Byleth said. “I trust you.”

In her inflectionless voice, it sounded like a threat. “Good.”

They split up: Byleth upstairs to the rooms their employer had booked, Shamir to the other end of the tavern to relax by the window. When they’d scouted this tavern, which the Blade-Breaker had discovered would be their mark’s meeting place, Byleth had spotted a rickety ladder to the second floor tucked behind some barrels in the back.

Shamir had a feeling they should have swapped. Shamir had the bow and Byleth had the sword, but Byleth had blinked fast enough that, in the right squinty lighting, might be mistaken for a wink, and said, “Do you trust me, too?”

Not particularly. But she trusted the kid’s father, and the kid’s father had insisted the two of them pair up for this part of the job. “It’ll be good for her,” Jeralt had grinned with a hearty clap on Shamir’s shoulder. Before Shamir could explain she was paid to kill, not babysit, he’d added, “Too many decades of kicking ass…kid could use fighting with someone better’n her. Complacent mercs are dead ones, right?”

And Shamir’s quiet, secret ego had agreed.

Even if she had no idea what the old man had meant by _decades_. Byleth was hardly out of her teenage years, though with a personality that colorless, her maturity level was difficult to—

All the buzz and bumble of happy, inebriated guests failed to muffle heavy footsteps from above. Shamir froze, taking shallow breaths, as if doing so would heighten her senses in such a bustling crowd.

Something heavy fell to the floorboards above her. Something large.

Shamir casually wove through the laughing, drinking mass of bodies back to the bar they’d deemed their watchtower. The bartender reached for a new flagon, but she ignored him, flicking daggers from her sleeves into her gloves. She wished she had more than a dagger in each sleeve and a minibow strapped to her back, but ‘incognito’ meant ‘few weapons,’ their employer had insisted.

Voices: a deep, gravely voice, and a higher-pitched, curt one.

Shamir had never heard Byleth’s voice sound like that, but if something had jostled anything resembling _emotion_ out of it…

She crept up the stairs, sticking to the shadows with both daggers an extension of each arm.

“I told you not to,” Byleth’s voice resounded through the upstairs hallway, cold and sharp as a knifepoint to the throat. “I refuse to give you the opportunity to try.”

Shamir rounded the corner, ready to pounce—

“Kid, they won’t interfere. I swear; we’re just gonna shepherd ‘em back over here—”

The Ashen Demon and her father, Jeralt the Blade-Breaker, stood with their hands on their hips in the same pose with the same sulk on their faces. A tied-up hooded man squatted half-conscious in the corner.

Shamir scoffed, and the little family jumped at her voice. Rather, Jeralt jumped. Byleth’s head just swiveled, following the source of the sound. “I thought you were watching the perimeter, Blade-Breaker.”

“I was,” he said, almost defensively. Shamir smirked and could have sworn a matching one ghosted over Byleth’s own lips. “Saw this one—” Jeralt jerked a thumb over his shoulder at their captive “—climbing up a ladder, probably doing a last sweep for assassins. So, of course I—”

“Interfered with the mission,” Byleth interrupted. “I thought I was the one being complacent, not you. Why are you not paired with Shamir?”

Jeralt, at least, had the decency to blush. “Well, I—Kid, were you eavesdropping?”

Shamir coughed a laugh when Byleth nodded. “Duck,” Byleth intoned, but to Shamir, not—

Shamir hit the floor. Blood sprayed on the back of her neck, and Byleth’s cloaked victim rounding the corner dropped to the wooden boards next to her with a thrown dagger in its neck.

“You can get up now,” Byleth informed her. Shamir obeyed, chills racing down her spine at the sight of the venin sword clutched in their mark’s stiff grasp.

Nope. Silence could hurt like a mother—

“Nice hit,” Shamir said. Another flicker of a smile; she _hadn’t_ imagined it.

“I’m not complacent,” Byleth said, and while the words seemed directed at Jeralt, she also hadn’t unfocused her gaze from Shamir’s face. “I’m not the one who’s a quack.”

Silence again. A baffled one.

“Because I said ‘duck,’” Byleth explained to her now-unimpressed audience. “And because I’m good at my job. So the joke was—”

Jeralt sighed and hoisted their captive over his broad shoulders like a sack of grain. Maybe, Shamir wondered, they’d earn a bonus for capturing a live accomplice after killing the mark. “That one needs work, kiddo.”

“I hear the Blade-Breaker’s merc band is hiring if it wants a job,” Byleth tried again, her deadpan _almost_ hilarious. Shamir helped Jeralt cinch the bindings tighter while Byleth took care of the corpse.

“Silence suits you better,” Shamir suggested. The look her partner returned was just as blank as before, except now maybe she detected a hint of humor in their strange depths.

“With all the coin we’ll earn,” Byleth agreed, “maybe you can buy mine.”

Shamir hid her grin by rolling her eyes. No, she’d never met anyone like this expressionless kid. She knew she never would again.


End file.
